When the owner of a vehicle brings an allegedly defective vehicular battery to a mechanic shop or automotive repair center, a mechanic will typically first ensure that the battery is indeed defective. This is done to ensure that the problem is not somewhere else in the vehicle.
In order to conduct a diagnostic test on the battery, the mechanic uses either an independent tester and manual charger or a system that is an integrated combination of a battery testing device and a battery charging device. According to this currently available system, if the battery is diagnosed as having too low of a charge by the battery testing device, the battery charging device will commence charging the battery. Since the charging operation may take one hour, two hours or more, a low or discharged battery will prevent the mechanic from using any part of the system on another battery.
In view of the above, mechanic shops and automotive repair centers that regularly encounter multiple customers requesting battery diagnoses and/or charges at substantially the same time typically invest in multiple integrated battery testing and charging systems. Unfortunately, this leads to inefficiency since the battery testing procedure typically takes on the order of a minute or less to complete while, as mentioned above, the charging procedure may take hours.